Adobe is gearing up for the next release of their AIF Toolkit – the editor/preview tool for the shader revolution that’ll arrive with Flash 10 – and they have some small/big changes for the next version.

I’ve been working on the next version of the toolkit and I’m hoping it will make a bunch of you hydra developers happy. I’ve rolled in a lot of feature requests from the forums and the big news is that it should work on ALL supported platforms (OS 10.4.10+, XP, Vista) REGARDLESS OF YOUR VIDEO CARD. (…) We have made a language change to Hydra that will be in this next release. It is small, but it will break any existing filters. (…) Images will now be available by name in kernel scope instead of EvaluatePixel scope and that means that they can be used in per-frame functions like EvaluateDependencies and the region reasoning functions more simply.

Wonderful. I think he means evaluateDependents instead of EvaluateDependencies though. This function is called once per frame and actually demystifies one of the issues I had with the language – the inability to build a lookup table or “constant” values outside of the pixel iterator. Now I know.

Anyhow, read more about it here, on Adobe’s Kevin Goldsmith’s blog.